Latitude E6400: X4500HD enough for CAD or better go for nvdia ?

Hello folks,
I will order my E6400 on monday but still I don't know which video card to choose. I am a student doing mechanical engeneering in Germany and the upcoming semesters will require extensive work with CAD-applications (SolidEdge, etc.). One major criteria for me is battery life. Most people here achieve 5 to 6 hours of battery life with brightness set on low, wifi enabled and light browsing. 4 to 4.5 hours is possible with the nVidia quadro 160M under same condition.

So my question is:
Is the X4500HD powerfull enough to handle CAD-applications? Is it possible to open even more complex Part-/ assembly-files without having any lags when viewing/modifying them? or should i go for the nvidia quadro option?

I appreciate any of ur suggestions

greetz us786

 

Oh the X4500 is not half bad for integrated graphics, but for CAD. No, not even on life support. Go for the quadro graphics hands down.

also, what is the exact website?

 

Are you wanting to do 3D rendering in CAD? Is yes, the dedicated GPU will help but you will lose about an hour off the 6 cell battery run time.

If your 3D rendering is occasional or not complex the the Intel GPU will do the job. You might just see it happening for a few seconds rather than appearing instantly. The X4500 is similar in performance to the nVidia 7400 which was a respectable dedicated GPU only a couple of years ago.

My E6400 review includes some Cinebench benchmark results. Cinebench uses OpenGL which is what is used by most CAD software and can be used to provide a basis for performance comparison.

John

 

You can see as the Intel 4500 as the equivalent of a Geforce 7300M at best.
and the Nvidia Quadro 160M as a Geforce Go 8400.

Quadro is best design for CAD, and is resign to work with complex CAD projects.
Intel video card which give you a really old video card performance will allow you to do CAD, but I am not sure how it will run on a complex CAD project.

Don't worry about battery life with Nvidia, they do does a great job on their mobile video card to save battery. My brother Dell XPS M1230 laptop has a geforce 7300M and has 7 hours of battery life with the 9cell. Not bad for a machine that was not design to have long battery life like the Latitude series (CPU is less powerful, slower HDD (4200RPM)).